Graduated Filters:

When photographing landscapes during the day the sky will often be brighter than the ground causing problems with the sky being blown out, the way to reduce this effect is to use graduated filters.

Graduated filters come in 3 types soft, medium and hard, in most cases the hard grads are for a solid horizon for example where the sky meets the see with a relative straight line. Medium grads are for horizons which are not level but have hills and valleys in them as an example. Soft grads are where there is no defined line between the sky and horizon.

Using graduated filters: Once you have arrived at the shoot site plan the composition and position the camera, on a tripod, with the  composition correctly lined up. The next step is to meter the sky followed by the ground to see how many stops difference there is between the sky and land. For instance if the ground reads 125 and the sky 500 then there is one stop difference between the sky and land, position the camera back to the correct composition. The graduated filters come in 1 stop, 2 stops and 3 stops therefore in this case you will need a 1 stop graduated filter. Because the filters are graduated the bottom half of the filter has no graduations where as the top half starts very low then increases to 1 stop as you move up the filter. Therefore select a one stop filter and slide the filter inferno of the lens until the middle part of the filter covers the sky, which we know is one stop higher. When you take the image the sky will not blow out because it has been filtered to one stop lower essentially making the ground and sky meter at 125. The graduated filter can be set up using the hysteresis graph which will be discussed in more detail in this section

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